The Unusual Case of Mr. Hire is a film that works by subtraction. It is an architecture of vision, a psychological thriller so controlled and clinically precise that it resembles an autopsy more than a drama. Patrice Leconte, in an act of courageous artistic self-definition, abandons the comedy genres that made him famous to adapt Georges Simenon, and he does so with a formal rigor that chills the blood. The film is a closed world, a Sartrian Huit Clos (Behind Closed Doors) condensed into the empty space between two windows of Parisian apartments, an abyss in which two solitudes are mirrored, that of the voyeur and that of his willing victim. It is a masterful essay on the nature of watching and on murder as an act of collective prejudice.

The entire film rests on Michel Blanc's implosive performance, in one of the most successful counter-castings in the history of French cinema. Blanc, a pillar of popular comedy, is unrecognizable in the role of Hire. His body is rigid, his face a mask of calculated inexpressiveness. Hire is a misanthropic tailor, a man who has erected a wall between himself and the world, and his only form of human contact is voyeurism. Leconte and his director of photography, Denis Lenoir, bathe Hire's apartment in cobalt blue, a perpetual coldness that reflects his emotional tomb. His life is a ritual of meticulous gestures (cleaning up the dead rats his neighbors leave on his doormat, preparing solitary meals) and a single, obsessive deviation: watching his neighbor, Alice (Sandrine Bonnaire), every evening.

Hire is not a simple “voyeur”; he is an entomologist of other people's intimacy. He spies on Alice not with lust, but with a kind of desperate and detached devotion. Her window is the only lens through which his sterile life can absorb the warmth of hers. The film is a ballet of curtains opening and closing. When Alice, a figure of earthy, opaque beauty, realizes she is being watched, the power dynamic is reversed. She does not close the curtains. She does not call the police. She subtly begins to perform for her audience of one. Her awareness of his gaze becomes a weapon, and the viewer is forced to wonder who the manipulator really is. Bonnaire is superb in handling this ambiguity: hers is a mixture of fear, pity, curiosity, and a subtle, cruel calculation.

This psychological tension is grafted onto the mechanism of the thriller, taken straight from Simenon's novel (Les Fiançailles de M. Hire). A young woman has been murdered in the neighborhood, and the police, led by an inspector who embodies common sense and prejudice, investigate. The entire community has already passed its verdict: Hire must be the culprit. He is different, he is strange, he is lonely. The film is a ruthless dissection of how society treats the “Other.” Collective prejudice is an invisible but omnipresent character. Hire's real crime, in the eyes of the world, is not murder (which he did not commit), but his misanthropy, his refusal to participate in the social game. His diversity makes him the perfect scapegoat, and Leconte orchestrates the manhunt with the precision of a theorem.

The black heart of the film lies in the fatal attempt at connection between the two protagonists. When Hire, driven by the investigation and a desperate need to project his innocence onto Alice, breaks through the barrier of the window and confronts her, the film reaches its tragic climax. The meeting between the two in the restaurant is a masterpiece of awkwardness and revelation. Hire, the man who never speaks, opens up in a torrential monologue, confessing not only his voyeurism but his absolute and pathological love for her. His famous line about happiness (“It's when you're not afraid”) is the key to his existence. He believes, in his emotional naivety, that she is his only ally, the only one to whom he can entrust his life. He reveals to her the secret that exonerates him and, at the same time, condemns her and her lover.

The ending is a clockwork mechanism that clicks with inevitable precision. Hire's tragedy is a tragedy of trust. He, who has never trusted anyone, makes the mistake of trusting the only person he has ever desired. Alice's betrayal, luring him onto the roof to hand him over to the angry mob, is a calculated and cruel act of survival. The rooftop chase sequence is not an explosion of action; it is a public execution. The crowd below, the neighbors who until a moment ago were anonymous individuals, turns into a screaming mass, the real beast of the film. Hire's gaze, before he falls, is not one of surprise, but of resignation. It is the confirmation of everything he has always known about humankind. The Unusual Case of Mr. Hire is a work of formal perfection, a film where every silence weighs like a boulder and every glance is a verdict.